


Drift Partners

by koalathebear



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Dessert & Sweets, Drift Bond, Drift Side Effects, F/M, Fluff, Hong Kong, Manpain, Post-Canon, Soulmates, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 17:49:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koalathebear/pseuds/koalathebear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When you Drifted, you glimpsed all sorts of things from the wackily crazy to the positively mundane.  It wasn't even limited to facts.  Half a dozen Drifts together and Mako and Raleigh now had more than a pretty good idea of each other's pasts, their fears … even their fantasies which could make some people find it very hard to make eye-contact after that - except that many of Mako and Raleigh's mutual fantasies were occasionally disturbingly similar … It was something that they had made a conscious decision not to talk about yet but they were both acutely aware of what the other had seen while Drifting.  Raleigh was looking forward to testing the boundaries of the relationship though and taking advantage of things he knew that Mako wanted."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drift Partners

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a fic in which I explored Drifting, Hong Kong and its wonderful desserts ... and also hinted at a Raleigh/Mako/Herc dynamic ... I just want Herc to be happy!!! :)
> 
> Some of the text is from the official novelisation by Alexander Irvine.

Even though he'd only known her for less than two months, Raleigh already knew where to go in search of his co-pilot Mako Mori on days like this. 

It had been a long and excruciating day and instead of heading to the mess hall for dinner with everyone else, she had made herself scarce and headed off into the night alone.

After grabbing a slightly warm _cha siu bao_ from the mess hall, he had headed out after her, walking around the edge of the area officially known as the Hong Kong Exclusion Zone, but unofficially referred to as the Kowloon Boneslum by most people in the area. 

When they’d taken the kaiju out with a series of small tactical nukes, they’d made part of the city a radioactive monument. Nobody had expected people to move back in so soon, but then again, nobody had expected that more kaiju would come so thick and fast. Thousands of people lived in the Kowloon Boneslum now, and the gargantuan skeleton was a tourist attraction... unofficial, of course, since the Chinese government would hardly condone tourism in a nuclear hazard site. The area was now a strange mixture of Hong Kong Chinese, Chinese who had migrated from the mainland and also people from all nations who wanted a place where they could disappear if they needed to do so …

Raleigh looked up at the ribcage, the boney structure arching up over the lower buildings and curving into and back out of taller structures. Things got rebuilt quickly in Hong Kong, and in the eleven years since that kaiju bit the dust, the city had pretty much absorbed it, except for the skull, which apparently was revered as some sort of religious shrine. That thought filled Raleigh with considerable disgust. The kaiju were deadly, bloodthirsty monsters, responsible for devastation and death – definitely not something to be worshipped or loved. 

To aid in his search, he closed his eyes for a moment to latch onto an image or a place that he'd only ever seen, filtered through the lens of Drifting with Mako Mori. His mind grabbed it, assessed it and then he continued walking through the crowd as he studied the world around him, trying to match it up with the image he had seen in the Drift.

The Drift was a strange and funny thing. Journalists often asked him and other Jaeger pilots what memories you shared when you first Drifted with someone. Did you share the significant memories first or did random memories just come flying out of your co-pilot at you. Was it that you didn't share everything at once when you Drifted with someone? Did you ever encounter the same memories you saw before when you Drifted with your partner again? Most importantly – was it possible to actually hide anything from your co-pilot?

It was always a difficult question to answer and he had no doubt that it varied sharply depending on the identity of one's co-pilot. With Yancy, the two of them already had so many shared memories and shared experiences that sometimes it was difficult to know whose memory or thought was whose. Drifting with Yancy had almost been like a series of blended feelings and images, thoughts and words – random and sharp, soft and familiar. They had so many shared losses and sorrows, disappointments and joys that their Drift images tended to be quite abstract.

With Mako, the experience was very different. It wasn’t like any Drift he’d ever felt with Yancy or when on the simulator back at the Academy. Broken, yes, but also more intense. Lots of Drifts were staccato series of images at first, until the two brains figured out how to approach each other and get into the overlapping neural-handshake posture. At the Academy, there had been times when he had been bombarded with ceaseless images and noise that made no sense.  
When Drifting with Mako Mori, his Drift had been more like a movie where he was both a spectator and a character. He sometimes wondered if Mako had felt his own experiences so intensely. He didn’t think so—one of the reasons she had broken the Drift their first time together was that she had been too far inside her own past. If she’d been closely in touch with Raleigh’s past the way he was with hers, both of them could have re-centered and gone on. He had sensed that she had allowed herself to look among his memories, but she was careful not to become fixated or distracted. No one could ever accuse Mako Mori of not learning from her mistakes.

Sometimes journalists asked him if he had a problem allowing a woman to have such intimate access to his thoughts. He always thought that a supremely strange question. Man, woman, parent, sibling, lover or stranger – there was always going to be an unsettling intimacy to letting another person inside your head. Gender was irrelevant.

When you Drifted, you glimpsed all sorts of things from the wackily crazy to the positively mundane. It wasn't even limited to facts. Half a dozen Drifts together and Mako and Raleigh now had more than a pretty good idea of each other's pasts, their fears … even their fantasies which could make some people find it very hard to make eye-contact after that - except that many of Mako and Raleigh's mutual fantasies were occasionally disturbingly similar … It was something that they had made a conscious decision not to talk about yet but they were both acutely aware of what the other had seen while Drifting. Raleigh was looking forward to testing the boundaries of the relationship though and taking advantage of things he knew that Mako wanted.

The last of their Drifts had been while they were on a simulator as the technicians tried to finetune the neural handshake and reduce the risk of pilots falling out of alignment. There had been specific tasks that they had been asked to address while in the Drift, but Raleigh had also taken the time to look around and get to know Mako better. He knew she had done the same.

Clouds gathered overhead, picking up the city’s illumination and reflecting it as a pink glow that made the area look a little sickly. It fit the Boneslum’s atmosphere. Raleigh shouldered his way through the crowds to a pocket of open space on one corner and glanced through the crowd. She'd had a head start on him so it was unlikely that he'd be able to see her in the crowd but he looked for her anyway.

Raleigh walked down the alley. Like most of Hong Kong—especially the older parts like Kowloon, and even the parts of Kowloon that only looked old because they were built after the kaiju attack—this alley wasn’t just back doors. There were plenty of storefronts and houses. The distinction between streets and alleyways wasn’t always relevant here. People were watching Raleigh closely - many of them knew who he was and there was a wary respect and gratitude in their eyes. No one tried to speak with him, though.

For Raleigh, Cantonese with its nine crazy tones was one of those impossible languages, Mandarin with its four tones was not much better although at the Academy he had at least managed to make a few phrases of Mandarin stick in his memory. In Hong Kong, he got by with a combination of English and his extremely crappy Mandarin.

Hanging onto the image he had seen in the Drift, he kept walking. The Drift could be very stream of conscious. The key was to let it flow by and not get caught up in random memories. That was while you were Drifting though, after that – you had all the time in the world to remember, evaluate and assess the images you had seen while Drifting. 

When he lay in his bunk at night and closed his eyes, Raleigh's head was filled with images of growing up as a child in Japan. His tongue tasted strange foods that he had never experienced and he found himself dreaming and speaking in Japanese with a native fluency he did not actually have. He shivered and almost wept at the fears of a tiny, orphaned girl and he raised his eyebrows and grinned in anticipation at some of the more vivid fantasies that the deceptively demure Mako Mori locked away in her subconscious. He looked forward to exploring them further with her when they were both ready. Mako was still grieving and the hurt was raw like an open wound, but one day, when she was ready to let loose, he'd be there and ready. More than ready.

As for him, he'd finally started the healing process. Merely having had Mako see and understand the loss and grief he had felt when Yancy had been killed meant sharing the burden. Although part of him felt guilty for having inadvertently burdened the already troubled Mako with his memories – just the fact that Yancy was remembered and missed by someone other than Raleigh brought a strange comfort to him. Sometimes they would talk about his memories of Yancy from their childhood, from days at the Academy … suddenly it didn't hurt to think of his brother anymore. For the first time in five years, he felt as though there was a chance at a brighter future.

He was making damned sure that he was there for Mako so that she didn't go through her loss alone the way he had ... He wasn't going to let her make the mistake of hiding away and exacerbating the grief and trauma. Perhaps he wasn't the best person to talk to about feelings and sadness, but he understood and he was there and he knew how she felt and he knew for a fact that she found that comforting even though she never said so aloud.

He continued walking, studying the streets and looking around, at one point he climbed up a series of staircases and out onto a balcony overlooking the Boneslum so that he had a better view of the shops lining the road. Under the lowering sky, it was an eerie scene. He imagined the scale of a creature, that when it died they had to reconstruct the city it had tried to destroy around its bones. There was a little poetic justice in it, too. Despite its crappy, decrepit experience, the Kowloon Boneslum was a testament to the will of humanity to survive, to adapt, to rebuild. 

You could see exactly where the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone were. They formed a sort of teardrop shape, widest around the kaiju skeleton and trailing back southward, where only a narrow part of the Exclusion Zone reached the waterfront. It had been pricey hotel real estate before. Now the whole area had a different feel. Right up to the edge of the XZ, it was Hong Kong business as usual, packing everything as tightly as possible and steeping it in neon. Every square inch of every surface was designed for one purpose: to make money.

That all stopped at the Boneslum boundary. Inside the XZ, things were built the way Raleigh imagined they had been before things like building codes and effective local government came along. Streets vanished and reappeared randomly. Buildings rose and leaned against each other, seemingly made of the rubble left in the wake of the kaiju’s passage and the nuclear strikes. The area inside the XZ, except right around the skeleton itself, was like a vision of Hong Kong from a hundred years before, or maybe two hundred. Astonishing, he thought. His mind almost wanted to interpret it as a movie set, because he couldn’t quite believe that such a place still existed literally touching the gleaming steel and neon city that enclosed it.

Raleigh wondered what a good geneticist would find in a population that had spent the last ten years in the Boneslum. He was guessing a pretty high mutation rate, along with the occasional outright freak. Perhaps that's why he felt right at home in the place despite the linguistic challenges.

The balcony looked right out over the ribs, with the skull facing toward them. Raleigh had a strong feeling that something still lived in those bones. Newton had told him that the kaiju carried the entire memory of their species in each string of DNA. Who could know what information, what sentience or even will, still survived in those bones?

Finally, the object of his search was located and he walked into a small, dingy Hong Kong café – much like thousands of others in the city. The walls were grungy, the tables makeshift and rickety and the stools cheap and extremely uncomfortable. In the corner, sitting on her own and staring out a window gravely was Mako Mori, the woman who had become the most important person in his universe. The dark blue tips of her hair swung around her jawline, providing a splash of colour in the darkness. 

"Are you really going to finish all of that on your own?" he asked her quizzically, nodding at the waitress who smiled at him as he dropped himself onto the empty stool opposite Mako.

" _Daap toi_ (Cantonese for table-sharing) is only for when it's crowded," Mako told him without looking at him. "There are plenty of empty tables over there."

"Yeah, but I like this table and you've already done the hard work and ordered most of my favourites," he told her, reaching out for the large bowl of gleaming black grass jelly that was positively drowning in coconut milk and sago balls.

"That's mine," she told him but let him take it without argument.

In front of her was a huge tall glass of shaved ice, red bean, ice cream, coconut milk and sago known as a red bean ice, a plate of mango pancakes, a bowl of coconut jelly and an enormous bowl of _doufu fa_ a popular sweet tofu dessert laced with syrup and cane sugar.

"Mako, as your co-pilot, I'm honour-bound to help you get through this," he told her, gesturing at the Hong Kong desserts in front of her. "If I let you eat all of this, there is absolutely no way you're going to fit into your drive-suit. Seriously – eating this much sago on your own is likely to short out the circuitry."

That brought a reluctant smile to her face and she started sipping her red bean ice through a huge straw, her eyes huge and inquiring above the glass.

"How did you find me?"

Raleigh tapped his right temple and winked at her. "It took a bit of sifting and analysis, but I had a pretty good idea."

"I thought that you weren't supposed to be looking at memories when you were Drifting," she pointed out. "Actually - I thought you were helping me fight Kaiju, not look for dessert."

"Hey- I'm an old hand at this. I know how to multi-task," he protested with the charming smile he knew she sometimes found irresistible. "I can also park it and review later at my leisure," he told her with a wicked smile curving his firm, sensual mouth.

"Stop!" she told him firmly, holding up one slender hand, not liking the wicked gleam in his blue eyes at all.

"How much will you pay me not to tell Marshall Hansen that you think he's hot?" Colour flamed in Mako's pale face and she looked around the table for something to throw at him. He caught the scrunched up napkin easily with one hand before it could hit him in the face. He leaned back, grinning broadly, his good-looking face alight with wicked mischief. 

"You throw like a girl," he remarked, putting the napkin back on the table. "Hey, I mean he's not my type – given that he's a guy and all, but I can see why you girls would go for him … even though he's kind of old," Raleigh teased her. "It's probably all that stubble," he remarked, rubbing his hand over his own clean-shaven jaw and pretending to frown thoughtfully. "Maybe I should consider shaving less," he mused. "But I know how you feel about my boyish good looks," he told her knowingly.

" _Please_ be quiet," she told him, glaring at him, not sure whether to laugh or hit him for finally vocalising things that had been learned while Drifting.

"Hey, I'm not jealous, I'm fine with it as long as you still think I'm hotter," he said, enjoying the spark in her eyes and the way her full lips pressed together in displeasure. "It's ok, I know you've been looking around in my head, too. I'm not shy. I'm guessing you've already seen one of my own personal favourites – you, me, bathtub, your favourite dessert …"

Mako choked on her drink and Raleigh was all solicitous concern, pounding her back and helping her to mop her streaming eyes.

"OK, I'll stop – I don't want to make your drink come out of your nose. That's not a hot image," he remarked and she glared at him again through her coughing fit and demanded.

"Why are you here?" she asked him, genuinely perplexed. 

He was dressed in cargo pants with one of his many, thick knitted sweaters and his heavy coat pulled around his shoulders. Raleigh Becket always had a careless, loose-limbed way around him, wearing his clothes rather than the other way around. His swagger spoke of confidence rather than arrogance and she liked the way he seemed comfortable in his own skin.

"Lookin' for you, dummy," he told her. 

Earlier that morning, together with Herc Hansen and Tendo Choi they had attended yet another frustrating meeting with United Nations representatives. The first Jaeger program was being sunsetted with research continuing into Pons/Drift technology and Kaiju Science initiatives to reverse engineer Kaiju biotechnology, Hong Kong’s Shatterdome being in the centre of these research initiatives.

Nonetheless, although the Breach appeared closed and surveillance of Challenger Deep and nearby areas of the Marianas Trench revealed no unexpected energy discharge and no evidence of tectonic activity other than typical subduction rates observed over the past several decades, there was no place for complacency. 

At Herc Hansen's instructions, surveillance in the former Breach area continued. If the enemy that created the kaiju and the Breach was not killed in the detonation of Gipsy Danger’s reactor, they would try again. Although closing the Breach had given the world valuable time to regroup and prepare, no one had any idea how much time they had and how long it would take the Precursors to find another way back to attack and colonise the Earth. Hansen, Mako, Raleigh, Tendo and others were advocating a Second Jaeger Programme as a pre-emptive line of defence.

Naturally there were a multitude of matters to discuss and rationalise – what to do with the Anti-Kaiju Walls in various states of incompleteness around the world, intellectual property and physical ownership issues regarding the design and construction of the new Mark 6 Jaegers, cities for deployment, who would be responsible for funding, what rights arose out of such funding, were smaller states disadvantaged as compared to larger states? There were national security issues, anti-terrorism concerns, black market theft matters, ownership of research outputs. The US wanted to use Pons/Drift technology to interrogate terrorists but to date, thankfully, no one had found a way to make it only one-way, so at present, you couldn't use the tech to interrogate someone unless you were prepared to have them go poking around inside your head, too.

There were so many issues to discuss and resolve that one wondered when it would be possible to start construction of the new Jaegers.

Sceptical as Raleigh was of some of Newton and Gottlieb's theories, the things that they had recounted accorded with what he had experienced while falling through the Breach into the Anteverse with the dying Gipsy Danger and there was no doubt in Raleigh's mind that the earth would be attacked again.

During his time in the Anteverse, his every sense had been overwhelmed with the wrongness, the utter alienness. 

He had described his experience in a detailed report and his account had been entirely consistent with those of Newton's and Gottlieb's even though it had been written independently and without consultation. 

A great city made of flesh and bone and organ, grown and made over millions of years. The centre of everything the Precursors had built, the last gasping remnants of a planet they had come to from somewhere else and somewhere else before that. They had drained it of everything they could use and now if they could not move on they would die in their city that spanned from horizon to horizon under an aging sun that smudged pale and dim across a sick and smoky sky. 

Over it all, the Anteverse side of the Breach, held in a gantry of magnetic force surrounded by biomechanical engines that pulsed in time to the Breach’s oscillations, supported by machine-organs whose nerves led invisibly through the substrata of the Anteverse’s great and dying city to the places where the Precursors did their work, sorting, breeding, blending, building.

Raleigh shivered, remembering the endless landscape of bone bridges, bone roads, rivers and lakes of bioslurry, buildings like exoskeletons, carapaces, within which pulsed organs. He could still feel their anger and fearful hunger.

Mako saw the shiver and nodded. "Given what we know – the delays are very … frustrating." With her Japanese accent, 'frustrating' always sounded very endearing.

Still, frustrating was beyond an understatement. For three Rangers who wanted decisive action, wading through a sea of bureaucracy, politics and administration was a living nightmare. Herc Hansen, a hard-hitting, straight shooting Australian with no patience for bullshit was being forced to keep his temper and true feelings reined in sharply. Too much rode on the outcome of the meetings for him to be as blunt and outspoken as he would have liked. All of them were reaching inside themselves and discovering new diplomacy skills that they had never even suspected that they possessed.

Mako and Tendo had the technical nouse to be able to convince. Raleigh was persuasive and sincere and had a personable way of dealing with even the most difficult of delegates. Herc, despite his grief at the recent loss of his only son, was able to convey an aura of gravitas, dignity and experience and his reputation as a decent man with integrity was a huge point in his favour. 

"Think of all that crap as being like another kaiju – we just have to get past it," Raleigh pointed out as he drank from her tall glass of red bean ice, placing his lips where hers had been.

"You want me to cut the UN reps down with a sword?" Mako asked, spooning a mouthful of coconut jelly into her mouth. Raleigh watched her full lips close around the spoon and some explicit images filled his head, wildly inappropriate but extremely pleasant.

He leaned forward and she automatically fed him a spoonful. He tasted the slick, sweetness of the dessert on his tongue, savouring the fact that the spoon had just been in Mako's mouth seconds before.

"Don't be so literal with my metaphors, Mako," Raleigh said, shaking his head as he tucked into the mango pancake with gusto. 

He paused only to give an indignant Mako a few spoonfuls of her own dessert. The intimacy of feeding one another hadn't escaped him, nor had their way of brushing against one another, fingers linking and tangling unconsciously.  
Post-Drift hangover with Mako was also different from how things had been with Yancy. Despite being so reserved and almost strait-laced, the afterglow of Drifting with Raleigh had made Mako uncharacteristically comfortable around him – very tactile and more than happy to be close to him physically. Raleigh found himself liking that. A lot.

He liked the way she'd find herself leaning towards him subconsciously when they were speaking. He liked the way they found themselves invading one another's personal space without knowing or caring that they were doing it. If he had something in his hair or on his face, Mako would reach up absently to pluck it out or brush it away even though should would never do that sort of thing to anyone else.

"They could attack us again any day," she muttered in a low voice, stabbing at the grass jelly with her spoon as if it was a monster to be killed.

"Hey don't kill that, I want to eat it," he told her, grabbing the bowl of grass jelly from her and sliding an empty plate towards her instead.

"I don't know how Marshall Hansen manages to not lose his temper," Mako exclaimed.

"I think he waits until after these meetings to let loose. Have you _seen_ the way he tears up the kwoon these days?" Raleigh demanded. 

Mako nodded, wincing in sudden memory. "He threw me across the room last time – it was after we had that terrible meeting with those Environmental lobbyists. I was so bruised," she remembered.

"Yeah, I couldn't walk for a week after our last meeting with the UN," Raleigh told her. "Herc almost decapitated me."

"Is that why you followed me instead of him?" Mako asked him pointedly.

"I'm letting him work off some steam first – then we can go and challenge him to a fight," Raleigh told her with a wink. "You might even be able to make a few of your fantasies come true," he told her and laughed out loud when she turned bright red.

He reached out and caught her small hands in his. His hands were large, calloused but always very gentle with her – except when they were fighting in the kwoon. His touch soothed her as much as it aroused her and she remained very still as he kept both her hands in his and reached up to touch her cheek with his other hand.

"We'll get through this, Mako," he promised her. "We've been able to achieve so much. We closed the Breach, saved the world. A bunch of politicians and bureaucrats aren't going to be enough to shut us down."

"I know," she told him simply, his conviction was persuasive. 

Raleigh threw some money on the table as Mako cleared up the table and stacked the bowls and plates in a pile for the waitress. She was always so considerate. Raleigh had found himself doing the same thing in the mess hall, conscientiously putting empty plates and cutlery in a pile to minimise the work of the serving staff. Next he'd be dying his damned hair blue.

The only sign of himself that he detected rubbing off on her was the faint swagger that had entered her walk, overriding her previous quiet, slightly hunched walk. He'd noticed the way her shoulders were back more these days, her walk loose-limbed and confident. It also made her clothing tighten across her breasts, something appreciated by many of the males in the Shatterdome, much to Raleigh's irritation. Being aware of her attraction to Herc was one thing, having her ogled by every Tom, Dick and Harry was another thing.

He found himself wondering which of his other traits might end up rubbing off on her. It was an intriguing thought.

He stood and waited by the door as she thanked the waitress and then the two of them stepped out into the night.

This part of Hong Kong had definite smells. The warm, humid air combined with the rotting food and other unmentionable things, gave the Boneslum an extremely distinctive smell. The contrast with the modern section of Hong Kong with its sky scrapers and technology was always quite jarring. As Mako and Raleigh walked side by side back to the Shatterdome, he would occasionally reach out and steady her as she slipped in something on the dirty, slippery ground which he could only hope was dead fruit or vegetable but might be something else entirely.

In the end, they end up holding hands as they walked, his hand, warm and reassuring around hers.

When they arrived back at the Shatterdome, they made their way to the kwoon where they were greeted by a sweaty Herc who was dressed only in black pants and white undershirt, clearly fresh from a fight. He looked grim but exhilarated and scarcely out of breath. A series of limping and dazed-looking personnel in the background made it clear what had been happening while they had been away eating dessert.

"So what's up here? Turned tail and ran? Too bloody chicken, the both of you," Herc told them provocatively.

"Hey we're here now, aren't we?" Raleigh demanded as they entered the room, both of them unlacing and pulling off their heavy boots and setting them to the side as Raleigh pulled off his coat, jacket and shirt.

"Late though – in the hope that the others have worn me out," Herc retorted.

"That's not possible, sir," Raleigh replied with no mockery in his voice. "Better watch out for Mako – she's full of dessert. Could get a bit messy if you kick her in the stomach," Raleigh called out.

"He ate even more than I did!" Mako protested indignantly, not noticing the warm and admiring gazes from both men as she did quick warm-ups and stretches at the sidelines.

A quick round of paper, rock scissors had Raleigh's paper losing to Mako's scissors and he headed onto the mat against Herc first to face his doom as Mako rocked back on her heels watching the battle that was to ensue. A smile of anticipation curving her full mouth. 

Half an hour later, as an exhausted Mako lay gasping on the mat, face down with a sweating Herc Hansen pinning her down, she paused longer than necessary before tapping the floor to request release.

"You know it's just a little bit kinky that you seemed to enjoy that," Raleigh remarked provocatively as Herc released Mako from the arm-lock.

"Unlike you – I actually won once," she said defensively Raleigh who was sitting on the sidelines, somewhat bruised and holding an ice pack over a rapidly blackening eye. He was smirking knowingly at her.

"You'd have won twice if you didn't enjoy being pinned down by the Marshall quite so much," Raleigh teased her and she threw one of her discarded socks at his head. When he caught the sock, she threw the other one, glaring when he pretended to gag and gasp at the smell.

"Children, children …" Herc said shaking his head, glancing back and forth between them with a gradually dawning look of comprehension on his tanned face.  
Mako gave a shriek of protesting laughter as Raleigh leapt to his feet and flung her over his broad shoulder, carrying her easily towards the door.

"Put me down, _baka! _" she ordered him.__

__"She totally wants to 'date' you Marshall," Raleigh called out even as Mako made a sound of impotent fury, pounding against his back._ _

__Herc Hansen's jaw dropped and his blue eyes widened in shock as he considered the pleasurable implications of Becket's bombshell announcement. It was entirely possible that he might have lingered over Mako several seconds longer than necessary after the takedown, breathing in her sweet, elusive scent – although he would have denied it emphatically._ _

__"But you'll have to wait your turn, sir. I have some unfinished business in the shower to attend to with my co-pilot." With that, Raleigh vanished from the room with a protesting Mako over his shoulder and Herc Hansen was left alone in the kwoon, looking very bemused._ _

__Herc Hansen had very little to smile about these days. Grief and loss hung about his heart and head like an almost unbearable weight, warring with guilt and regret about Chuck. He still hadn't been able to bring himself to go through Chuck's personal belongings._ _

__Nonetheless, with the noisy departure from the room of Raleigh and Mako, a smile twitched at the corners of his grim mouth. It had, quite honestly, started out being a complete shit of a day but life certainly had a way of surprising you._ _

__Pulling his shoes back on, with a slight swagger in his step, Marshall Hercules Hansen started walking back to his quarters, taking a detour in the direction of the showers._ _

__One of these days – and very soon - he was going to have to climb into a simulator with young Mako Mori and see if the Drift gave away anything of what lay behind what was clearly a deceptively demure exterior._ _

__The kaiju were bound to attack again and the safety of the world would be threatened again - but Herc Hansen had also suddenly found a reason to start smiling again._ _


End file.
